upFRONT

Shortly after I wrote this month's article I went to the
O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego. There, on a display
table in the exhibit hall, I found cans of a beverage containing
carbonated water, corn syrup, caramel color and caffeine, proudly
bearing the trademark “Open Cola”. Five cents from every can of
Open Cola will be donated to the Free Software Foundation. So it
does matter which brand of cola you drink! By the way, the recipe
for Open Cola is available under the GPL; see
opencola.com.

LJ Index—October
2001

Total compensation in billions of dollars for the
top executives at the top 807 companies in Silicon Valley in the
last fiscal year: 4.8

Above number as a multiple of the prior year:
2

Percentage of decline in stock prices of the MN 150
Index, which tracks the largest Silicon Valley companies over the
same period: 24

Number of times the word “shit” appears in the
first “South Park” program of the latest season on Comedy
Central, according to an odometer that displayed a running count on
the screen: 142

Number of e-mails received by Comedy Central in
response to the same “South Park” episode: 4

Percentage of received e-mails supportive of
profanity in the episode: 100

Number of patents issued in the year 2000 by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office: 158,118

Position of IBM among companies receiving US
patents in 2000: 1

Number of US patents issued to IBM: 2,886

Number of US companies in the top ten recipients of
US patents in 2000: 4

Number of Japanese companies in the same top ten:
6

Losses in millions of dollars by Webvan when it
went Chapter 11 in July 2001: 860

Number of pages crawled by Google:
1,346,966,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which “sun”
appears: 25,500,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which
“microsoft” appears: 20,200,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which “dell”
appears: 14,700,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which
“solution” appears: 13,300,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which “ibm”
appears: 11,200,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which “unix”
appears: 10,900,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which “perl”
appears: 7,650,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which “python”
appears: 2,070,000

Number of Google-searched pages in which “linux”
appears: 31,600,000

Linux-referenced pages per thousand Google finds on
the Web: 2.35

Sources

1-3: San Jose Mercury
News

4-6: The New Yorker

7-11: United States Patent and Trademark
Office

12: The Wall Street
Journal

13-23: Google, July 12, 2001

Windows Server Gains Appear to Be at Sun's
Expense

Netcraft's July Web Server Survey
(netcraft.com/survey)
showed a huge jump in Microsoft IIS' share of web server software
usage on 31,299,592 surveyed net-connected computers. After
reaching a plateau of around 20% in 1998, IIS suddenly jumped
nearly 5% to 25.88%. Apache reciprocally declined by 4.29% to
58.73%. Microsoft's gain represented about 2% of all active sites
on the Web.

Netcraft attributed the gain to a single event: the
conversion of domain registrar Namezero's servers from Solaris to
Windows 2000 and from Apache to IIS, along with a related move by
part of Network Solutions' domain registration system. Network
Solutions also moved physically from Digex to Interland (where
Microsoft has held a minority interest). “These large
installations had previously been masking a general decline in
Solaris share on the Web, which is now down four percentage points
over the last year”, Netcraft reported. “Additionally, the
Network Solutions site was by far the largest Netscape-Enterprise
installation in terms of numbers of hostnames, and one would expect
that Netscape-Enterprise overall share will drop toward the 2-2.5%
it has in the active sites analysis over the next few
months.”

The previous month's survey also showed a shift in Windows'
direction, again at Solaris' expense. In that survey, which
attempted to count computers rather than hosts, Netcraft found that
49% of the surveyed computers were running Windows. Linux accounts
for about 28%. And, all UNIX-related computers accounted for 45%.
The remaining 6% were non-UNIX or unknown. “As some of the 3.6% of
computers not identified by Netcraft operating system detector will
in reality be Windows systems”, Netcraft reported, “it would be
fair to say about half of public web servers world-wide are run on
Microsoft operating systems.”

Netcraft also reported that Linux “has been consistently
gaining share since this survey started but, interestingly, not
significantly to Windows' detriment. Operating systems that have
lost share have been Solaris and other proprietary operating
systems, and to a small degree BSD.”

The significant interpretation of the data, Netcraft
suggests, is that Solaris is “being continually chased further and
further up market by Intel-based operating systems, with Sun in
turn progressively eliminating the other proprietary UNIX operating
systems.”

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